Curious how RED ROCKETS will work in all this. While one can imagine putting one in an external PCIe box, that's pretty... inelegant.

Maybe we can hope for a RED ROCKET Thunderpants version?

Again - i think this is a great boon - it drives hardware makers to wrap their cards with a box and provide DC power (and shouldn't cost a lot more), yet it will enable users to use this gear on their desktop AND mobile computers... instead of being strapped down to a Mac Pro desktop because its a PCIe card.

I'd love to bring my BlackMagic gear with me - but i bought it all pre-Thunderdog - so they're a bunch of cards. A year from now? Ha. I can edit at home or at a remote site with just a small bag of tricks.

I even tweeted both the author and ars technica about this issue and received no response.

Anand Lai Shimpi wrote:

Both GPUs are technically removable, but at least one is mounted as the same card as the PCIe SSD.

If Anand Lai Shimpi himself says it is replaceable, I would not argue that point until there is significant evidence to the contrary. Even if 3rd parties have to make custom GPUs for the Mac Pro (maybe even with an SSD), it can and will be done in a few years if the GPU starts to feel slow enough to make it practical for them to do it. Please stop spreading the FUD that is the unreplaceable GPU, unless you can provide some serious evidence. If the cards can be removed, 3rd parties can develop replacements. We've seen it happen with Apple's proprietary MacBook Air SSDs, and it could easily happen here.

Please.

EDIT: and you said ATI graphics cards. ATI does not exist any more. I might hazard a guess that they're AMD graphics cards, though.

We know that the Mac Pro can have a pair of fast ATI GPUs (at least, fast for now) and that it has no shortage of Thunderbolt ports. It also has some very quick—but so far not very well-explained—PCIe-based solid state internal storage. The recent Thunderbolt spec bump gave Thunderbolt 2 the bandwidth to drive a 3840×2160-pixel display—that's the resolution on a "4K" display—and Schiller mentioned several times that the new Mac Pro could handle multiple 4K displays.

We also don't know how much RAM (or options) it has.

As for FCP - the current offering has been drastically watered down from it's previous capabilities - so are they going to add much of that functionality back in (and probably call it 'new features') or simply tweak it for the upcoming hardware specs (and 4k support) ?

"Even if 3rd parties have to make custom GPUs for the Mac Pro (maybe even with an SSD), it can and will be done in a few years if the GPU starts to feel slow enough to make it practical for them to do it."

Making a GPU work in the current MP requires little other than some extra code on the Flash. Yet it took about 5 years for this to happen, and even today there's less than a dozen of the thousands of GPUs in the world that do.

So what's the chance that they'll make a GPU that requires not only custom drivers, but a custom card AND a system for mounting the SSD?

Don't tell me I'm the one being unreasonable - the historical record is clear that the chance is zero.

"Even if 3rd parties have to make custom GPUs for the Mac Pro (maybe even with an SSD), it can and will be done in a few years if the GPU starts to feel slow enough to make it practical for them to do it."

Making a GPU work in the current MP requires little other than some extra code on the Flash. Yet it took about 5 years for this to happen, and even today there's less than a dozen of the thousands of GPUs in the world that do.

So what's the chance that they'll make a GPU that requires not only custom drivers, but a custom card AND a system for mounting the SSD?

Don't tell me I'm the one being unreasonable - the historical record is clear that the chance is zero.

Because they're developing ways to do it over thunderbolt for macbook airs and the like, so driver support will already be there. They just have to strip off the casing and make it fit. The SSD should be a non issue.

Curious how RED ROCKETS will work in all this. While one can imagine putting one in an external PCIe box, that's pretty... inelegant.

Maybe we can hope for a RED ROCKET Thunderpants version?

Again - i think this is a great boon - it drives hardware makers to wrap their cards with a box and provide DC power (and shouldn't cost a lot more), yet it will enable users to use this gear on their desktop AND mobile computers... instead of being strapped down to a Mac Pro desktop because its a PCIe card.

I'd love to bring my BlackMagic gear with me - but i bought it all pre-Thunderdog - so they're a bunch of cards. A year from now? Ha. I can edit at home or at a remote site with just a small bag of tricks.

How would that be inelegant? Doesn't sound like you've explored all the available options for chassis (?) (and it's early in the game yet)

This technology allows you to have nothing on your desktop except a monitor (or 10) if you so choose. Everything else can be racked, shelved, or not; whatever.This is the future

Both GPUs are technically removable, but at least one is mounted as the same card as the PCIe SSD.

If Anand Lai Shimpi himself says it is replaceable, I would not argue that point until there is significant evidence to the contrary. Even if 3rd parties have to make custom GPUs for the Mac Pro (maybe even with an SSD), it can and will be done in a few years if the GPU starts to feel slow enough to make it practical for them to do it. Please stop spreading the FUD that is the unreplaceable GPU, unless you can provide some serious evidence. If the cards can be removed, 3rd parties can develop replacements.

It doesn't take much operating system logic to make an accessory not work. Sometimes, it merely takes the lack of effort for a vendor to accomplish it. Such an effort gets as much support as Hackintosh and Jailbreaking- we'll break it as early and often as possible until you just give up and either go legit or go away. As much as I love Anand, he is dead wrong here. Don't assume that something as tightly coupled and kernel-mode heavy as a GPU is just a matter of whittling down a tab on an ESATA cable to fit in. I'll believe it when I see it, and when Apple has gone a whole product cycle without doing the exact same screwover in their flash drive packages.

Curious how RED ROCKETS will work in all this. While one can imagine putting one in an external PCIe box, that's pretty... inelegant.

One of my clients has a Red Rocket in a Sonnet Thunderbolt enclosure, and it works just fine with his Retina MacBook Pro. Pretty damn elegant, considering he can use it on set trivially.

I've been telling my clients to expect exactly what we are getting, and flexibility with bouncing peripherals between systems, desktop and mobile, is a big value. We have clients on fibre channel SANs using Thunderbolt fibre HBAs, works fine.

I even tweeted both the author and ars technica about this issue and received no response.

Anand Lai Shimpi wrote:

Both GPUs are technically removable, but at least one is mounted as the same card as the PCIe SSD.

If Anand Lai Shimpi himself says it is replaceable,

Nice dreaming there, except that Anand did not imply they could be upgraded in any sense whatsoever. The whole board can probably be replaced if something breaks, and Apple will no doubt be the only one with access to replacement boards. Anyone buying one of these machines in the hopes of a later upgrade to the GPU is deluding themselves. If you want your shiny new MacPro to last you 4-5 years your best bet is to go for the most powerful option, because you'll be stuck with it.

Maybe I'm not seeing what the big deal about the gpu not being replaceable is. As it stands the gpu market for Mac Pros is dismal and last I checked some of the cards don't even work or support all of OSX's functionality out of the box. You aren't even getting the full performance of the card since OSX's opengl situation compared to Windows is a little sad.

People are moaning about something that they really couldn't do well before anyway (do a google search and you will find nothing but complaints about what doesn't work after users upgraded their cards). What NVidia and AMD released for the old Mac Pro was really a joke imo. The Mac editions of the cards are usually more expensive than a windows counterpart and these are GAMING cards, not even quadros or firegl cards (because on OSX they use the same drivers anyway). The cards that worked and perform the best already come stock with the machine.

So yeah you can't upgrade the cards but given the current situation with Mac Pros and non-stock video cards, do you really want to?

I've heard it's aesthetic described as Darth Vader's sex toy but now having seen the image.. I can't... stop.. laughing. I thought the Xbone looked bad but it didn't bring me to tears laughing, it was more of a 'meh' response. It's right up there with Phil Schiller saying "Can't innovate anymore, my ass." While talking about it. I guess the statement and image play off each other, seeing it as something Darth Vader would put... Okay, that's enough internet for me today.

This technology allows you to have nothing on your desktop except a monitor (or 10) if you so choose. Everything else can be racked, shelved, or not; whatever.This is the future

How is this the future? My current Mac Pro and two external eSATA enclosures, and all other peripherals, sit below the desk and on shelves above the desk. This new Mac Pro design isn't a paradigm changer in this respect. It will just require more, and more expensive, peripherals than the old Mac Pro.

The problem with this hardware is that's nothing more than a 4K video editing power play too. If you're in that niche, you might be happy, but everyone else seems sad. Going back to a single CPU would be bad enough, but the corresponding limits in total RAM that come along with it is just crushing. The entry level for serious workstations is 48GB of RAM now (3 channels @ 8GB x 2 CPUs), and this box is behind that curve before it's even released. I expect a lot of people are going to have an eye out for picking up close-out deals on the current hardware, because it's starting to look like Apple will never make anything quite like it again.

So yeah you can't upgrade the cards but given the current situation with Mac Pros and non-stock video cards, do you really want to?

I've had a GTX 670 in my Mac Pro since Mountain Lion was released, and all I had to do to get it working was plug it in. The appropriate Nvidia drivers were added to OS X in 10.7.3 or 10.7.4, and were built into 10.8 from the start. I don't use OpenCL or CUDA, but for gaming and general use it's been flawless. The only thing I don't have anymore is the EFI boot screen, which I haven't missed. So yeah, I absolutely want to be able to do that again some day.

That's why this is frustrating; as someone noted in another thread, we finally get to the point where we can actually use cheap Windows cards easily (because I agree, Apple's video card prices are beyond absurd), and suddenly it's gone again.

Curious how RED ROCKETS will work in all this. While one can imagine putting one in an external PCIe box, that's pretty... inelegant.

One of my clients has a Red Rocket in a Sonnet Thunderbolt enclosure, and it works just fine with his Retina MacBook Pro. Pretty damn elegant, considering he can use it on set trivially.

I've been telling my clients to expect exactly what we are getting, and flexibility with bouncing peripherals between systems, desktop and mobile, is a big value. We have clients on fibre channel SANs using Thunderbolt fibre HBAs, works fine.

Even if it does 4k, it's not like they are early to that game, nor are there a lot of 4k productions actually happening. I have a hard time thinking that FCPX will steal any real proper Hollywood editing suites away from Avid right now.

This doesn't feel like a strong enough play to win back all the pros they stabbed in the back by killing our XML based EDL format (aka FCP7 XML.) We are still years from FCP being relevant again.

The problem with this hardware is that's nothing more than a 4K video editing power play too. If you're in that niche, you might be happy, but everyone else seems sad.

4k is really pushing the limits of what hardware can do these days. Almost every thing else can be done easily on an iMac, Mac Book Pro or what have you.

People who "need" expansion options that the new Mac Pro doesn't offer are the real niche, imho.

Quote:

Going back to a single CPU would be bad enough, but the corresponding limits in total RAM that come along with it is just crushing. The entry level for serious workstations is 48GB of RAM now (3 channels @ 8GB x 2 CPUs), and this box is behind that curve before it's even released.

That single CPU has 12 "real" cores and will approximately smoke any available 2 proc boxes today, especially when considering that most users can't make decent use of either dual CPU machines, or 12 core single CPU machines, rendering the difference moot.

128 GB of ECC memory (4x32) is more than the current generation supports. Of all the limits on the Mac Pro that you mentioned, this one might be the most "limiting" but it seems like Apple got the balance right, again.

I think this box is well balanced, capability wise, and will provide a big step up for the vast majority of the users who fall into the niche's it serves, imho.

The problem with this hardware is that's nothing more than a 4K video editing power play too. If you're in that niche, you might be happy, but everyone else seems sad. Going back to a single CPU would be bad enough, but the corresponding limits in total RAM that come along with it is just crushing. The entry level for serious workstations is 48GB of RAM now (3 channels @ 8GB x 2 CPUs), and this box is behind that curve before it's even released. I expect a lot of people are going to have an eye out for picking up close-out deals on the current hardware, because it's starting to look like Apple will never make anything quite like it again.

According to the specs published in the last day, the MacPro supports and will be available for sale with 128G of RAM (see this MacWorld article).

That's exactly what I was thinking. Hopefully they've done most of the major work on Final Cut Pro and that means they'll finally get around to Aperture, because it sure as hell needs some attention. I often feel like I'm one of the few who's still stuck with Aperture and not migrated to Lightroom. But if something doesn't come out this year, I might look into Lightroom, as much as that displeases me.

It'll never happen, but I keep holding in the recesses of my soul they'll make a version of FCPX for Windows. I know there are people that hate it, but it's something I've been able to learn. Since upgrading PCs is cheaper for me than getting new Macs (and certainly cheaper than this mac pro will be, I'm sure), I've been forced to migrate.

Question for me is: since FCPX is a Mac App Store app, and I was about to buy it, do I now wait because this new version might be a whole new $300 app? Or will it be just a regular version update that all current owners will get for free?

Irony: if the Mac App Store had paid upgrades, I'd probably go ahead and get it now.

Final cut? Isn't that the program almost everyone in the industry stopped using because it didn't support half the things they needed in order to do their jobs?

Yes, but the two dozen people that insist on using FCX will really appreciate those 12 cores and 128 gigs!

It would seem that the cylindrical design of the new Mac Pro is destined to herald a slew of humor on the Internet. When I first saw it I read a comment that said it looked like a waste basket, but the best so far is that this is what the result looks like when Darth Vader corners R2D2 in a compromising position.

Particularly telling is that a story about Final Cut and its relationship to the launch of Apple's newest Mac Pro has garnered only 34 comments in over 24 hours and this will probably be one of the last on the story. Bottom line: No one is paying any attention to Final Cut any more. The ship has sailed, the sun has set, and Elvis has left the building. The wedding videographers have moved on to Premiere and the big boys have gone back to Avid leaving a tiny island of people that just can't bring themselves to say goodbye still using Final Cut. Move on, people, and let the recovery begin.

Ah, the downvotes of outrageous fortune. What are there now? 70? 80? With all the people using FCX its bound to be overwhelming. So the grand total is.... three. 3 downvotes. That's it. And that people, right there, is a perfect indication of the number of people paying any attention whatsoever to Final Cut X. Not even enough downvotes to turn my posts invisible.

On the other hand, there are enough FCX users here to form a quorum for the national FCX user group.

That, or they're enjoying using FCP X too much to be bothered arguing with idiots on the internet.

I feel special now - I'm the first person to ever be called an idiot on the Internet. I'll always cherish this moment. And not only did you spare me some precious minutes in your busy FCX editing schedule to do so, but it looks like you even spent the time to log in under multiple accounts so you could downvote more than once and maybe even called up all your friends to contribute to the downvotes too, as evidenced by the three additional downvotes on the original post. Better let your team know that they missed one on the second post - it only has five.

So, in summary, there aren't even enough people using FCX to mount a defense against someone maligning their platform of choice. That's just sad (and yet a little humorous).

Particularly telling is that a story about Final Cut and its relationship to the launch of Apple's newest Mac Pro has garnered only 34 comments in over 24 hours and this will probably be one of the last on the story. Bottom line: No one is paying any attention to Final Cut any more. The ship has sailed, the sun has set, and Elvis has left the building. The wedding videographers have moved on to Premiere and the big boys have gone back to Avid leaving a tiny island of people that just can't bring themselves to say goodbye still using Final Cut. Move on, people, and let the recovery begin.

The Ars audience and the video editing audience in general don't have a huge crossover; this story only exists because FCP X was mentioned in the keynote at WWDC. To me and many others, FCP X is a really nice NLE, and repeating dated generalisations does nobody any good. For what it's worth, a very specific tool (Sync-N-Link) for FCP X that's only used by pros working in episodic TV is now selling higher numbers than it did for FCP 7.